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Five Ways To Use Your Social Profiles For SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Social media is becoming more and more important as the days go by; how else would I get my tri-weekly fix of XKCD delivered to me? Many people know about the marketing benefits from social media profiles, but sites like Facebook and Twitter can make a significant difference in your SEO campaign, too! This week, Rand shows us five great ideas for using these sites to help with your SEO strategy.

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about social media profiles. A lot of marketers, a lot of people in the SEO field know and realize that social media profiles can be valuable for their marketing efforts on the Web. But they don't know exactly how to use them or where to use them. That's what I am going to try to help you with today. So, what we have are five great ideas around how to leverage your social profiles to help with SEO and then some specific tactics and recommendations on each one that I think even some of the advanced folks will find pretty valuable.

So, let's start here with direct links. You can see that, basically, I can take my profile on a LinkedIn, a Twitter, a Facebook, a MySpace, a Digg, a Reddit, a Hacker News. There are tons of these, hundreds of these. In fact, I'll link you over. We've got sort of a list going on SEOmoz somewhere. You can take these, create profiles on here, and these profile pages oftentimes will have a followed link, sometimes will have a no followed link, but even that's okay, and point that link over to your website. So, essentially, MySite.com is now getting some credit. And this pen is getting thrown in the trash. Oh, I missed. Sadly missed.

When you do this, you do a couple of things. Number one is, when they are followed links, obviously you are getting direct link credit. When they are no followed links, sometimes people are picking these up and scraping them and you get credit from elsewhere. Sometimes you are just seeing the fact that, oh, someone finds you on those places. You've commented somewhere. They're checking out your profile. They can follow that link over to your website. So, having these profiles exist and having the links point back to the right kinds of places on your website is critically important, very valuable.

Number two, SERPs domination. Now, when you are doing SERPs domination, what you are essentially trying to achieve is to fill up the top results with results that are let's say positive or at least that you control what goes into those results. Places like Twitter.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, and even places that are a little more random in the social media sphere, like a deviantART or a Drawer.com, those types of places will all help you to potentially fill up these results. There are a few critical things that you are going to need to do if you want to get these ranking well though. You can't just create them. Tons and tons of people just create them. Lots of spammers just create them.

You need to fill up the profile with good information. You also need to participate relatively heavily in the site, at least initially. What you want to get going, if this is LinkedIn, you want to participate in LinkedIn Q&A. You want to actually import your email address book so that you form all of those connections. If this is Twitter, you want to start following people and topics. You want to start getting listed into the Twitter lists. You want to start having people following you and tweet at you. If this is Facebook, you're going to need those same sorts of connections. Whatever the community is, you need to build up a robust profile with actual content. Fill out all the minimum requirements. Maybe even go overboard and start adding lots of content yourself to your profile. Also, you want to contribute heavily so that this gets indexed by the search engines. It becomes popular on the social site and it gets you into the SERPs.

It is also very valuable to link to these. This is one of my sort of pro expert tips. What I personally love to do is everywhere I speak, everywhere I am asked to give a talk, everywhere that features a quote from me or features my profile for a webinar or something like this, I always ask them to use the same biography. That bio quote includes, it will say, "Rand Fishkin is the CEO and cofounder of SEOmoz." That links to our website. And, "He wrote 'The Art of SEO'." That will link to the O'Reilly site. Then, you know, "You can follow him on Twitter at RandFish," and that will link back to this Twitter profile site. Every time I give a speech, give a webinar, or participate in something offline, those links add up and help to make my profile rank better. It is a great, great way to go in terms of building links to those individual profiles. A really smart way to leverage offline and online marketing together.

Number three, so, brand awareness. On a lot of these sites when you are participating, when you are doing good things to get those direct links and doing good things for SERPs domination, you are also getting a lot of brand awareness. This is really important from the perspective of you don't want to contribute to social media sites, particularly if you are a brand representative or a representative of your company or a representative of your personal brand in a way that would be contrary to how you would like your brand to be perceived. I know this is more sort of a marketing communication discussion, a little bit less SEO. But it is critical for SEO as well, because people who find a divergence between who you are on Twitter and Facebook versus who you are on your blog are going to be put off a little bit. There is that emotional disconnect that happens when you see that a brand or a person isn't being authentic to itself. That is why it is critical to maintain those.

The other thing is you do want to make sure that you are leveraging these in smart ways. If you have a Facebook profile that you're trying to build up, you are definitely going to want to link to it from your own website. I want this site over here pointing to Facebook and referencing it and making this sort of a conversion focused action that will drive people to participate. Remember that you can get network effects out of these. When you are updating your statuses, when you are providing information on these, you want these to be followed by people but you want to make sure that they are the kinds of things that people want to see, that they want to share. You can't just be adding junk content.

It has to be updates not only that are sort of interesting and valuable, but updates that will make other people look good when they share them. We've talked about this principle a few times at SEOmoz. The idea in the social media world is even bigger. When you look at what gets re-tweeted, what gets re-shared on Facebook, what gets re-blogged on a platform like Tumblr, it's the stuff that makes the person who is sharing it look good. Right? So, when I tweet out something about SEO, if it is just self- promotional, not a lot of folks are going to tweet that. But if I tweet out something that is interesting research about the field, a lot of other SEOs are going to tweet that because it is going to make them look good to their followers. That is what you are trying to achieve.

Number four, drive traffic and second order links. Right? So, with a lot of these social pages you have the opportunity when you produce content on them -- when I tweet, when I do a Facebook status update, when I blog on Tumblr, when I contribute a LinkedIn status update, even when I contribute a post on a social news site like a Reddit or Hacker News or Digg or Delicious or something like that -- to potentially promote a link. Those links will drive direct traffic, usually in proportion to the number of people that are following me.

But there are lots of other principles at work here, too. That's I why I recommend you check out something like "The Science of ReTweets" by Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. It will tell you things like there are certain times of day that are more optimal. There are certain words that are more optimal and less optimal to use. There is certain phrasing and formatting. In particular, this is a pro tip for Twitter stuff. Make sure that you don't start the tweet with the link. Start the tweet with some copy. And you actually want to make sure that you have some extra content at the end of it. Potentially, one of the things that we've seen is that having either a hyphen or a colon before the link, announcing it, is really good, and that having hash tags, if you put a hash tag here right after the link, it will sometimes make the link stand out less. So the optimal way to go is text introducing the link, link, some additional text, and then if you want a hash tag or a reference or a via or those kinds of things.

Remember that if you do a direct re-tweet, it won't show as coming from you. So if you can make those tweets unique when you are sharing a URL, you are likely to get paid more attention as well. The great part about this is you don't just drive traffic with these, you also drive these sort of second order effects. I'll show you an example. My friend Kang here from up above has found this link. I've tweeted it out. Then he goes to MySite.com. He visits whatever page I've tweeted there. Then he thinks, "Oh, well, that's actually pretty interesting." So, Kang's blog now links directly to it. This is why it is so important to be building that type of content that is share worthy, which we talked about a second ago, and to be tweeting, sharing, linking to, and Facebook status updating and LinkedIn status updating with those types of things. They are the kinds of things that will drive those second order effect of links and that will help you do SEO in the long run.

All right, final one here. Number five is that social media profiles can be a source of content for your site, both direct and inspirational. This means that social profiles can help you build the content that you need to have on your site in order to perform well in the engines, in order to target the long tail in a lot of cases. I'll show you what I am talking about. And even to do some exciting link based stuff.

One of the tactics that I really liked is a specific one, and I'll talk about a couple, is to use YouTube. YouTube sometimes will have very popular videos. When they are reference videos, or they are longer videos, or they have sort of tougher to understand content or the kind of content were someone might actually want to parse it in text form, you can personally transcribe. Add some value, right? Break out the things that are important. Bold them. Highlight some quotes. That kind of thing. Build, essentially, your own version of that video. You can embed the video from YouTube on your site, have a commentary and transcript. Do an SEO friendly title. Now you've created great content using, leveraging someone else's YouTube video. This kind of thing is just a phenomenal way to build content in a scalable way. You know that this is interesting stuff. You know this is stuff people care about because it has lots of views. It has become popular. Lots of people are tweeting it and sharing it. So you can follow up and capitalize on that.

You can do this as well with things like Twitter. If people are tweeting links or tweeting a conversation back and forth -- you'll see TechCrunch do this all the time, where they'll take an interesting conversation or Media Gazer, those kinds of sites -- they'll take an interesting conversation back and forth and they'll republish it with sort of screenshots of the tweets back and forth between people. They'll do a little bit of analysis. That will become a blog post. A permanent piece of content that other people will reference and link to and comment on and add content to. That means you can potentially earn rankings and traffic for those in the engines as opposed to tweets, which dissolve. I really liked a quote that was tweeted today that was for Brett Tabke. He said that the instant a blog post is created that content starts living forever and producing SEO forever. The instant a tweet is created it starts dying. Right? It starts going away. It becomes temporal. It fades in the background.

You can also use this for more direct kinds of content generation. That is to say, particularly on sites like Twitter, which essentially are very temporal in nature. As we've discussed, you can take this content that you produce, I tweet a few times a day, some of them are very interesting links, some of them are interesting content, and I can reproduce them in sort of a daily digest on my site. A blog post if I'd like. An archiving system. That content is priceless, right? I've carefully crafted those 140 words, but what are they doing for my SEO? Nothing. That is why it is so valuable to potentially releverage the content that you are creating in a walled garden environment, like Facebook, something like LinkedIn, particularly something like Twitter that is temporal, into this format on your own site and have the opportunity to rank for it.

All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We look forward to seeing you again next week. Take care.

If you have any tips or advice that you've learned along the way, or have a question, we'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

About Aaron Wheeler —
Aaron is the manager of the Help Team at SEOmoz. He's usually thinking about how to scale customer service in a way that keeps customers delighted. You'll also find him reading sci-fi, watching HBO, cooking up vegetarian eats, and drinking down whiskey treats!

73 Comments

What Rand is talking about is popularly known as 'content Curation'. It is the process of reviewing and filtering blog posts, articles, tweets, updates etc across your social network and then revewing them in your own words, developing new contents around them or weaving them together in such a way that it adds value. It can be excellent way of developing large volume of high quality contents in short span of time and to grow your followings/ connections. However you should acknowledge the orginal source (wherever necessary) as their is a thin line between content curation and plagiarism. Stealing someone's else ideas,opinions or spoken words can also be considered as plagiarism. Transcribing someone's else video may be seen as copyright infringement. So get the permission first. Here are some content curation tools you can play with, this weekend:

1. thecadmus.com - It shows the most important tweets in your network

2. pipes.yahoo.com - A powerful content curation tool.

3. postrank.com- you can filter the most engaging and popular blog posts.

Thanks for the post! Maybe not entirely new stuff but a great reminder with some helpful tipps. Now I just gotta find that list you were talking about and will be busy for several days. Have a great weekend everyone!

"So, essentially, MySite.com is now getting some credit. And this pen is getting thrown in the trash. Oh, I missed. Sadly missed."
This made me laugh. Not sure why, maybe it's Friday. Can we have a pen throwing competition at the London Pro Training? :-)

I think this kind of a posting was needed, since many people in the industry misuse their social networks profiles or just abandon them. It's easy to do either one and it's a shame, because social networks have a gread deal os SEO potential. You'd think that what's written in the post is common sense, but I found out it's not.

I agree a lot with what you say, infact some of the tips you propose are on my way to get into production.

I would add another simple tip that i'm finding rewarding. Put your twitter name in the email signature, and also your Fb Page.

And use also an email marketing tool that allows easily to share on social and attract people to your social sphere too.

Finally, talking about profiles, do not forget you have one right here on Seomoz! I do this when i've an email dialogue with other web agencies: i put a link to my Seomoz profile in the signature; the fact i am in a good position in the user rankings here is another endorsement i can present to new potential partners... And it works.

Richard, thanks for the reminder about Google Profiles. I've ignored mine for a couple of months. Rand, another WBF great for sharing! Loved the tip about using screen shots of Tweets to create content.

One idea regarding point 4 and how you structure your tweets to drive traffic is to introduce your link with a question. Don't just make a bald statement about the content of the link you're trying to drive traffic towards; instead, ask a question that's relevant and that is likely to engage people - either because they agree or disagree, doesn't really matter.

Thanks for the tips. One problem that I often find myself struggle with is time. Practicipating into these social media sites requires much time because we are trying to be human; read people comment and actually reply to them. Besides using tools like Hootsuite, could you suggest other tools that can speed up this process?

I try to get SEO value from my tweets by republishing all my tweets from a single month into a blog post on my personal blog. I also do the same with all my delicious bookmarks from a single month. It's a really easy way to get an extra 24 blog posts each year. If you have 10 great delicious bookmarks about a specific topic, you can also turn that into a Top 10 blog post.

This was a very informative video. Its great that even though people are trying to get more hits and increase their own popularity, the only way to do that is to create high quality content and to share it for the public good!

Great tips! thank you so much for all the info on this post. I will make sure I read "The Science of ReTweets with Dan Zarrella" This is another reason why social media news releases such as http://www.prunderground.com are a Social Media and SEO love affair;)

I just don't get it. This is one darn good video and explanations of social & SEO and someone thumbed it down 3 times? Who is the nucklehead that keeps thumbing down posts? Did they create 3 profiles? This has been consistent and just bugs me, that's all </end rant>

Man you guys gotta get Aaron a better picture. He's all up in the camera and kinda looks like a fish. Looks like a camera phone pic.

Anyway, super WBF Rand. Social media profiles are highly neglected. I probably speak for a lot of us when I say I'm probably guilty of neglecting a few of my own. I've recently been doing better at this and have noticed a pretty considerable increase in social media traffic. Records across the board.

Profile pages also give you the opportunity to deep link. If you're getting links from places like directories you can rarely do this as they will insist on a link to the homepage. If you can get a few links to important internal pages, that's got to be a good thing. Since social media pages usually display the URL as the anchor (and assuming you've done your job right with your internal URLs) you'll get the keyword for that internal page in the anchor.

What is your experience with text associated with videos? Have you tested whether search engines and/or users prefer close transcriptions of videos, or do they like text that summarizes/highlights the video content?

I've been a lurker for a while, but this wbf was so awesome I had to post.

I like where you went with the youtube section, but you didn't cover something I've been messing with lately and have a question about. I've found that it is more valuable to embed videos in our blog posts and elsewhere from our facebook page instead of our youtube page mainly becuase the like button follows (or used to) with the video. Lately, I've not been seeing the like button on the videos any more. Can anyone confirm that facebook has stopped including the like button on videos embedded from an fb page?

Hi Rand, a nice post. The thing is: You have to constantly work on your profiles to keep it authentic which can get quite time-comsuming. Plus social sites come and go.e.g. in the list you were talking about there were some services off the market.

It does take a good amount of time to build up your reputation and profile on any social networking site. I think trying to do it that way with dozens of sites would take a lot of work that could be better spent elsewhere, particularly if you are doing it just for the sake of building your profile and intend on abandoning it.

Sticking with the safe bets is probably the way to go. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and maybe some industry specific sites.

Good post. Informative and I`ve kind of been in the dark with regards to social media really being useful in SEO, other than the obvious points such as placing a link to the site in question and plugging the site in text. The trick I guess is to get the text concise and informative but interesting and relevant so peopleon Twitter will respond to it...difficult depending on the site your dealing with.

The thing I always struggle with is the challenge to keep all the content that you produce interesting for you followers or target group. I always tend to notice some "satisfactionary point" where visitors tend to have enough information to their interest and will stop visiting the website/ the twitter profile/ et cetera. Sharing it across (through links) various platforms might keep that stream of new visitors coming.

Thanks for this, really interesting and informative. Leveraging Social sites is hard work, but I know we are getting the the early signs of improving traffic to our site. It's how we invest the time wisely and effectively that's the judgement call. But thanks for sharing.

Looking at your Google SERPs (Rand Fishkin) I see your facebook account being only shown on page 5. Is this a choice you did by putting more emphasis on your other social profiles (ex: Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Profile) doing your linkbuilding since Facebook is less business oriented? Would this be something you also recommend?

"Number four, drive traffic and second order links. Right? So, with a lot of these social pages you have the opportunity when you produce content on them -- when I tweet, when I do a Facebook status update, when I blog on Tumblr, when I contribute a LinkedIn status update, even when I contribute a post on a social news site like a Reddit or Hacker News or Digg or Delicious or something like that -- to potentially promote a link. Those links will drive direct traffic, usually in proportion to the number of people that are following me."

Our experience with Twitter and Facebook is they do not drive much inbound traffic. The content is important to establish and maintain a social brand, however we don't bank on inbound traffic from social media networks.

Nice WBF topic. A lot of people have been missing this part of SEO. I love that tip you mentioned on brand awareness. Don't tweet if it is just a self-promoting post. And I agree on that. It won't draw interest on your followers.